How professional are our interpreters? A South African perspective on the role of the interpreter.

Harold M. Lesch
Department of Afrikaans and Dutch
University of Stellenbosch
South Africa

The role of an interpreter in an up in coming multilingual society entails more than just to render an efficient simultaneous and/or consecutive interpreting service. Apart from the prerequisite that the interpreter should be proficient in at least two languages, the relevant experience is often a major source to one’s advantage. It is quite normal to expect from the interpreter in a multilingual South Africa to interpret to translate, to edit, proofread, to assist in terminology development, etc. These language related activities are essential in language practice but should be complemented by certain functional choices that need to be made.

The interpreter should facilitate communication between speakers of minority and majority languages. But why is it then that interpreters, powerful individuals who have occupied centre stage since the origins of cross-cultural communication, have traditionally been portrayed as mere language conduits, invisible parties in the communicative events, yet capable of performing complex linguistic and information linguistic tasks. The professional discourse on interpreting, is for the most part, based on a belief of an objective meaning, arguing that interpreting is about conveying that same meaning in a different language (Angelelli 2004:44). Meaning after all is not objective and independent of the parties who are constructing it.